Email is not effective as an internal communications channel

The cost of internal email overload. Research shows that it takes 64 secs for an employee to recover from an email interrupt (not including the time it takes to read the message). So for a 2000 employee organization with 30 ‘mass emails' (That’s all those mass corporate communications emails, IT updates, marketing updates, messages from HR etc) sent per week, this equates to almost $1m of lost productivity (assuming an average salary of $50k per year). There’s a cost calculator here so you can plug in your own numbers for your own calculation.

Ineffective mass emails. Believe it or not, many staff set up email rules to auto file or even delete “all staff” emails. Even if they haven't, they may not bother opening these emails due to information overload. Therefore, email is often no longer effective as an internal communications channel.

Snap Mag - An Innovative Staff Magazine Tool

Reduce email overload . Snap Mag lets anyone in the organization enter general information updates (marketing updates, IT outage information, HR updates etc) into an internal communications magazine format which an editor can approve before publishing. This format reduces information overload, interruption levels and aggregates mass email updates into a 'one stop shop'.

Reduce the time to produce an employee magazine . Snap Mag allows anyone in your organization (if you choose to let them) submit articles into the internal magazine. Editorial controls allow you to maintain control of the content and layout. No longer do you have to chase people across the organization for e- magazine content. Snap Mag does this for you.

Engaging visual format. The Snap Mag format helps you get information across in an engaging, visual way. Layout options enable staff to submit images together with their articles which are automatically resized to fit the staff magazine template.

Easy to read. Snap Mag is designed to be scanned, and ‘read more’ links take people to intranet pages, web pages, or even documents on the network to get more information. Snap can report on these links to show you how popular a particular article is with staff. This lets you know what type of articles you need to provide to engage your readers.

Easy to respond. Embedded email links let readers reply to authors directly. Depending on the number of responses, they may decide to take the topic further, calling a discussion group, summarizing comments in the next edition of Snap Staff E-Mag or setting up an Employee Blog or Forum for more debate.

Target to different audiences. You can target Snap Mag to different groups. For example, individual departments may want their own version of the magazine.

Up to date information. Snap Mag allows you to produce a staff magazine very quickly with limited resource. Printed staff magazines (or laborious html magazines that you have to pull together yourself) can be out of date before staff even read them.

No HTML formatting required. Snap Mag is automatically produced without any need to wrestle with html formatting.

More effective than an intranet notice board. SnapMag provides you with more editorial control plus you can push the published magazine out to targeted computers. Some people won’t use notice boards as they are a destination ('out of sight, out of mind') so they resort back to email updates.

Build engagement. Snap Mag helps you get information across in an engaging, visual way and, by encouraging staff to become involved in creating the magazine, builds a sense of community and engagement.

Bypass email. Snap Mag is not delivered by email but in a way which is more likely to attract staff’s attention. Each time you publish Snap Staff E-Mag, a ticker bar appears and scrolls three times at the bottom of staff’s computer screens. Staff can click-to-read there and then, or go to their message history to read the latest issue at a time which suits them better. And/or they are able to access the magazine via hyperlink, for example, from a screensaver, desktop alert or the intranet.

'Safe' social media channel. Your company culture and demographic may mean that senior managers are reluctant to use tools like employee blogs and forums. They may fear losing control or fueling dissent. Under these circumstances, SnapMag can be a great alternative. It lets you distribute ‘safe discussion’ directly to staff’s computer screens.

Staff Magazine Options:

• Pushed – directly to the computer screen in a number of ways.
• Customizable look and feel – administrator(s) set up the layout of each staff e-magazine.
• Targeted – E-magazines can be department, region, interest or project specific.
• User generated content – employee can easily submit E-Mag articles.
• Innovative delivery – E-Mags and/or headlines can be promoted as scrolling news feeds.
• Searchable – staff can search a database of past E-zine articles to revisit.
  
  

Staff Magazine tool - FREE TRIAL